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7.27.2017

After losing a house, two jobs and $16,000 in court expenses, Phil – whose name has been changed to protect his anonymity – humbly received his ambitious reward: his son, for five hours, once a month.

Five days ago he paid a monthly fee of $600 still owed from the home’s mortgage, a fee he will continue to pay until 2027 when his son will be 15 years old. Phil now pays more in child support than he earns from unemployment checks.

“My son was about four inches taller when I finally got to see him,” Phil said. “His mom told him not to tell me what his favorite color is, but I think it’s green. She also told him not to tell me his favorite superhero, but he let that one slip: Batman,” he said. He just hopes to be a close second one day.

Men’s rights advocacy was partly catalyzed by stories like Phil’s. Through forums like MensActivism, A Voice for Men and Reddit’s Men’s Rights board, men’s rights advocacy attempts to provide support and resources for fathers with similar struggles. However, their outreach is inhibited by their designation as misogynist hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). The SPLC describes the men’s rights movement as “savaging feminists,” and cites the website manboobz.com as a useful watchdog of the men’s rights movement.

Male mortality rates paint the grisly picture that illustrates the story behind the men’s rights movement.

Advocates see that men are five times more likely to commit suicide than women; that men are twenty times more likely to die in the workplace; that men are four times more likely to be the victims of homicide. Men’s rights advocates see disproportionate workplace deaths and question the existence of disproportionate privilege.

“Privileges are things that [men] were born into, not that they’ve had to earn,” she said. “The ability to, as a white person, walk around department stores and not feel people’s eyes on you and be followed. I didn’t do anything to earn that privilege. It was just something I was born into.”

Many scholars believe that the men’s rights movement is simply a backlash to feminism and the progress it has attained for women. Megan Williams, Program Coordinator for the Emily Taylor Center, agreed.

“[Men’s rights advocates] use the language of civil rights to undercut actual inequity,” she said. “It’s really just a reflection of men who are seeing their privilege challenged; seeing the entitlement that they’ve had challenged and thinking that that is oppression or discrimination.”

Men and indebted fathers struggle to reconcile their alarmingly higher rates of experiencing homelessness and being victims of homicide as challenged privileges. Men posting on MensActivism and A Voice for Men often resist the implication that the right to a home and life are privileges to be challenged.

Like McBride, Williams viewed feminism as a solution for the issues central to men’s rights advocates.

“If we’re talking about liberation of men, then that is a feminist project. If we’re talking about a real men’s rights movement, it’s feminism,” Williams said.

The most urgent men’s rights topic for fathers, however, is the low likelihood of fathers being granted primary guardian custody of their child after a divorce. Custody is six times more likely to be obtained by the mother.

Phil doesn’t identify as an advocate for men’s rights or women’s rights: just a father, if only for five hours a month.

Phil was deployed to work on oil rigs for nine months per year. After four months of working rigs in Saudi Arabian waters, he returned to his home in the deep south to find it empty.

“Everything was gone. Furniture, TVs, kitchen stuff — you name it, it was gone,” Phil said. But, while furniture is replaceable, family is not.

“My heart sank when I knew what she did. All I thought of for months was seeing my wife and kid; maybe watching a movie or something,” Nease said. “Now I don’t even have a TV.”

Phil was the sole working parent while married. While he was on oil rigs, his wife was at home serving as their son’s primary caregiver. According to KU Law Associate Professor Melanie DeRousse, parental roles like those held by Phil and his ex-wife while married limit the outcomes of custody battles.

“Most of the time moms are doing that primary caregiving. The judge wants to maintain that stability for the kids so the kid has access to that attached parent. They’re going to maintain some of that gender disparity that was existing in the relationship into their orders. They’re looking at what will not disrupt the kid’s lives, not some parent’s rights,” DeRousse said.

If the mother serves as the child’s primary caregiver while the father is only parenting during the weekends, the judge will grant joint custody with the father having the kid for the weekend, while the mother maintains the child during the week. Extended periods away from his son while working hurt Phil’s chances of attaining equal joint custody.

Melanie DeRousse said that, while some judges may assume that the kid is better off with his/her mother, “more often than not you have the parties trying to figure out what form of joint custody is going to work for the kid.” DeRousse added that, “Most psychologists would agree with the legislature: joint custody is preferred for the kid.”

As traditional gender roles continue to undergo egalitarian permutations, fathers will begin to attain equal joint custody more frequently. Male mortality rates and mental health still present an issue, however, and men’s rights advocates and feminists view their respective movements as the optimal solution.

A Voice for Men founder Paul Elam argues that feminists preach equality while pursuing favoritism. Annie McBride, Megan Williams and most self-identified feminists disagree, instead viewing feminism as a potential solution for men’s rights issues and equity for all genders.

Both men’s rights advocates and feminists will continue to pursue their ideal of gender equity. Both men’s rights advocates and feminists will continue to provide assistance to men or women suffering through mental illnesses or unforgiving workplaces.

Meanwhile, Phil will be eagerly anticipating his next visitation with his son.

“[My son] likes the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, so I bought him some action figures and Ninja Turtle shirts — stuff like that. Hopefully he likes them; I just wanna see him happy.”

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7.21.2017

By Justin Hermstedt

Melodrama is an album of high and low, flight and crash landing, ecstasy and hangover. In the four years since the release of Pure Heroine in 2013, Lorde has accumulated a new trove of source material for her autobiographical songwriting. With Melodrama, Lorde reestablishes her ability to translate her experiences into bittersweet illustrations of young-adulthood. Lorde, along with collaborators including Jack Antonoff (aka Bleachers) and Flume, crafted a comeback that’s too nuanced to be called a breakup album: Melodrama is a quest for identity.

The album comprehensively tackles the spectrum of emotions a breakup imposes. Lorde begins by revealing the unhealthy duality of her former relationship, then sifts through the different stages of grief and heartbreak she endured. Lorde begins and ends Melodrama with radio-friendly pop jams, but we’re taken on a visceral journey in the space between “Green Light” and “Perfect Places.”

“Green Light” is an energized kick starter to the album that places Lorde in a reckless post-breakup furor. Wasting no time, Lorde tosses a hope-filled key change at the listener after a scathing first verse (to be clear, we’re only 45 seconds into the album at this point). This divergence introduces the identity crisis that a breakup can hurl you into, especially when you’re young. When you love a partner, they become a part of who you are. You’re not yourself without them–you’re not whole. When they leave you, it doesn’t shatter your delicate glass heart; it tears a chunk of flesh from your body. Many-a-songwriter would whimsically say they were “left to pick up the pieces.” Instead, on “Sober II (Melodrama)” Lorde bluntly shares the “terror and the horror” of her “holy sick divine nights” newly alone.

The feeling that connects the first ten tracks of Melodrama is uncertainty. Lorde grapples with a number of pressing questions. How do you recover from heartbreak? Who are you without that person, without that missing part? Ultimately, what lessons and memories do you take with you from your failed relationship?

It’s difficult to answer these questions for yourself, and harder still to know if you’ve answered them correctly. On the question of how to cope, Lorde has a few strategies, each under the mantle of a different persona. The first Lorde we meet is the deadened ballader of “Liability.” Blaming or hating yourself is a foreseeable stage of grief, but she manages to escape the abyss of total self loathing. She leans on her own shoulder, calling herself “the only love [she hasn’t] screwed up.”

“Hard Feelings/Loveless” introduces us to two new shades of Lorde. These personas are like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, if Dr. Jekyll was timid and melancholic, and Mr. Hyde was a bad bitch. As “Hard Feelings” fades out, we start to get the sense that Lorde is going to be okay. There’s still some venting to do (cue “Loveless” and “Sober II”), but she’s given the first indications of inner-peace.

Inner-peace and acceptance are the goal from the get-go, (from the green light, if you will) but they don’t come naturally after being dumped. You’re given a few variables–anger, misery, delirium, etc.–and you have to plug them into an equation. Somehow, these terrible feelings are supposed to equate to peace.

In the third act of Melodrama, Lorde tries to make it compute. The last four tracks really are a remarkable sequence of music, and they propel the album above the sum of its parts. On the heart-wrenching “Writer In the Dark” Lorde finds strength in her solitude in New York:

I ride the subway, read the signs

I let the seasons change my mind

I love it here, since I stopped needing you

Now that she’s allowed herself to move on, Lorde reflects on what she wants to take with her from her former love. It’s okay, Lorde suggests, to cherish certain memories; they don’t have to be tarnished by the bad ones.

The reprise of “Liability” is one final vanquishing of self-blame. Lorde defiantly declares that its his fault, his loss, and his problem. “You’re not what you thought you were. Leave.”

“Perfect Places” was tepid as a single. It seemed playful and catchy, but not particularly deep. As the conclusion to Melodrama, it’s triumphant. “Perfect Places” chronologically pairs with “Green Light,” depicting a vignette of Lorde a year or so after the the events of the rest of the album. She tumbles through a cycle of partying, but remains very self-aware. Not all of her wounds have healed, but perhaps they don’t need to.

Amid her heartbreak, she rediscovers herself as a balance of those personas and who she was before. The impossible equation that neutralizes heartbreak hasn’t been solved, but it’s been reframed. Lorde processed the hopeless pits of self-blame, the unfulfilling pursuit of revenge, and the crushing weight of uncertainty, and she forged a stronger self. “The heartache, and the trauma, and the fucking melodrama,” have lead her here. The end of Melodrama finds Lorde wandering on, still learning and still healing. Miraculously, she’s able to roll her eyes at the melodrama of it all.

Expect adversity, and redirect it to change you for the better. Expect to hear “The Louvre” on season 2 of Riverdale. And expect to someday hear more from Lorde, a prodigious songwriter and voice of a generation.

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5.08.2017

By Scott Chasen

Aungelina Taglia came back from the library with a friend and ate a grilled cheese sandwich. She left some crumbs on the plate, a mechanism she uses to cope with her anorexia, but could feel an anxiety attack coming on. She typically didn’t eat late at night, a rule she’d broken that Monday.

With an anxiety attack imminent, Taglia did what she always does. She lied to her friend and told her she was going to hang out with someone else. She got in her car, an appropriately named Ford Escape Hybrid, and drove down 23rd street, past the QuikTrip on Haskell and onto K-10, in hopes of calming herself down.

Some 14 miles later the feelings of nausea had started to fade. Taglia pulled off the side of the road at the Lexington exit in DeSoto, turning around and making the trek back to Lawrence and texting a few friends before falling asleep. The drive, which she’d make again after waking up in the middle of the night, has become far too common in her life.

“I’ve only told my friends that I’ve done that once,” she says of the drive she makes three to four times a week.

Awareness of mental illness is something that is more present now than it has been in past years; more students are being diagnosed with mental health disorders and more are seeking help for the things they identify themselves. According to Christian Vargas, a licensed psychologist and outreach coordinator for the university Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS), an estimated 10 percent of the KU student population will have gone through CAPS this year, continuing with a recent pattern of increase. Yet, even as more initiatives exist to help students suffering with mental illness on campus, many difficulties for those students, including the stigmatization of mental illness and lack of understanding from those on campus, remain.

When students like Taglia tell their friends what they’re dealing with, too often the response is one of surprise. Perhaps it shouldn’t be — according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness more than one in four young adults (between ages 18-25) have a diagnosable mental illness — but students often find their friends have their own internal definitions of what someone who is mentally ill should look like and are even skeptical about hearing they have a friend suffering from those same conditions.

That’s part of why Taglia, who has also been diagnosed with severe depression and anxiety, lies to her friends. She recognizes at least part of her hesitancy comes from the experiences of when she’s tried to open up, only for her friends to struggle to comprehend her feelings. As she recalls the memories, she bites her lip and forces a pained smile, fiddling with a hairband on her left wrist.

The first reaction that pops into her head is about one of her tattoos. On the underside of her right wrist is a semi-colon, a symbol representing perseverance and the movement against self-harm. When friends ask about it, she explains its meaning, only for them to ask who she knows that’s actually dealing with those issues, often times in a lighthearted tone that only adds to her frustration.

“It’s like people don’t think you can function … if you suffer from mental illness,” Taglia says. “They’re integrated with you every day in your daily life. You just don’t realize it.”

* * * * *

Nowadays, when she isn’t working one of four jobs on and off campus, Taglia spends much of her time focused on the topic of mental health and poverty. Her interests in the field originate from her high school experiences. By her freshman year, she was taking care of her mother, who was on several medications for mental health disorders. But Taglia was struggling too, and was hospitalized after she was found attempting suicide freshman year.

Two years later, it was her mother who was in the same scenario. Taglia was pulled out of class one day by three police officers and taken home, where she was told her mom had threatened suicide and locked herself in the house.

Taglia went up to her front door, eventually getting inside and calming her mother down. The two went to a hospital where, by the end of the day, her mother had been released. Reflecting on the experience, Taglia was baffled that given what had just transpired, her mother could so quickly be deemed “mentally competent” and cleared to go home. She wanted to understand the systems that were in place and why they were, in her mind, failing. Years later, it’s her continued dissatisfaction with the system that is at least part of the reason why she isn’t currently undergoing treatment.

For her, a big problem comes with the nature of how things are treated on campus. She says through her research she’s become aware of the resources to help students struggling with mental illness, but often times they only serve to help after something has gone wrong. In her view, this lack of preventative care creates a new problem for universities, leaving too many students who need immediate help from a potentially overextended staff.

“If they’re not in the preventative stage and they’re just in the after stage of trying to help people,” Taglia notes, “there’s going to be too much in the after stage to take care of.”

To be clear, this problem isn’t unique to KU. More and more, it’s happening nationwide. In fact, a recent petition launched by Jacqueline Basulto, a Columbia University alumna, asked for expanded mental-health services at 20 different universities, including Harvard, Yale, Stanford and Columbia. In February, her university responded, pledging to strengthen its mental health services, offering mental health training — a similar initiative to KU — and creating a mental health awareness week, according to a New York ABC affiliate.

Similarly, at KU wait times can be an issue. Though Vargas notes “urgent needs will be addressed the same day,” one student in particular, Christine Waisner, says she was unable to get help she needed within a time frame that worked for her.

Waisner, now president of the mental health awareness group Active Minds at KU, wasn’t always vocal in the mental health community. Diagnosed with depression, anxiety and an eating disorder, Waisner found it difficult to connect with friends about what she was going through. When she did reach out, the response was usually disappointing.

“So many people just blew it off or they’d be like, ‘Eat a hamburger,’ ” she says.

In her sophomore year, Waisner attempted to make an appointment at CAPS, but the then-one-month wait time was enough of a deterrent that she opted to go off campus. By the end of the year, she’d dropped out of school, taking the end of the spring and the summer to work through some of her difficulties.

Since then, others have identified a similar problem. Harrison Baker, who was on the Student Senate subcommittee for mental health in the 2015-16 school year, put together a report on some of the problems across various colleges, finding many campuses were understaffed and underfunded. “It’s not specific to KU,” Baker says. “But here’s what students across the nation are facing, and it’s no different here at KU.”

Through working with then-Student Senate vice president Miranda Wagner, Baker helped produce a bill to give that subcommittee more power, eventually turning into its own advisory committee with power over the mental health fee. As a chair for the committee, Baker pushed for a $9 increase to the student fee for CAPS to offset what he described as an “unacceptable” student-to-therapist ratio.

Entering 2016, Baker said, the ratio was about 2,200 students for every mental health professional. He said a more ideal number would be anywhere from about 500 to 1,000 students per professional, with the lower end of acceptability being about 1,500 to 1.

But as much as the issue seems it could be fixed by hiring more therapists, that doesn’t solve the underlying problems. It’s important for a university to be properly staffed to help students after a traumatic event, but it’s equally important to focus on helping students before they get to that point.

And that’s where students like Waisner try and pick up the slack.

Waisner returned to KU for her junior year in 2016, ready to get more involved on campus. She looked on the Rock Chalk Central website, picking out the group she now presides over, at least in part by chance. “I went on the database with all the organizations on it,” she said. “You know, it starts with A, so it was at the top of the list.”

From there Waisner rose through the ranks, tabling with the group a few times before becoming an event coordinator and eventually president. Among the projects she’s overseen has been an initiative to fight rising suicide rates nationwide by trying to put the national suicide prevention hotline number on the back of the student ID cards, in addition to the campus police and health services numbers.

The group also helps in other ways, meeting in person to provide members a forum where they can engage with others in conversations about mental health. Other events for Active Minds at KU include presentations from guest speakers as well as panels about various disorders, among other things.

“No matter what the event is,” she says, “it does tend to end up being a place where people are having conversations that they usually don’t have or don’t feel comfortable having.”

* * * * *

While Waisner lauds some of the progress that has been made on campus, she’d still like to see more of it. One area she says she feels passionate about is “mental health days” — allowing students to seek help for mental illness without being penalized for missing class. However, because of how the university is structured, the systems set up to help the students, like the Academic Achievement and Access Center (AAAC), aren’t able to mandate leniency for a student who misses class because of a mental-health related issue.

Deborah Meyer, associate director of the AAAC, says one of the biggest problems her office has in helping students can be working around a professor’s policy. “We know the importance of participation in the learning process,” she says. “If the instructor has that as part of their syllabus, we’re going to have a really difficult time justifying (that) you don’t have to come to class.”

That can be one roadblock for the office, which Meyer said has seen a recent influx in students with mental illness. In fact, over the last few years, she notes, mental illness has become the second most common reason students contact the AAAC behind only attention related-issues.

However, that increased awareness does not always mean students are fully willing to share their experiences with mental illness. If they opt not to disclose the specifics of their condition, it forces the AAAC to advocate for them while leaving the professors in the dark. Other students may simply choose to learn how to best advocate for themselves, rather than opening up about their difficulties to the office.

“I still believe there’s quite a social stigma around disability, period,” Meyer says. “Everything is on a continuum, but some students do not want to talk about having an attention deficit issue, they don’t want to talk about a learning disorder, they don’t want to talk about a visual or hearing impairment or they don’t want to talk about a mental health disability.”

That puts the professors in a difficult position. When things aren’t explicitly stated, it’s hard for many of them to know what the right actions to take are when presented with students who seem like they’re struggling. Likewise, some professors struggle to identify the signs of mental illness, but it isn’t necessarily for a lack of caring.

“They want to help,” Meyer says. “They’re not exactly sure how they might be able to.”

* * * * *

While some struggle to broach the subject of mental illness, others like Dan McCarthy, a KU journalism advisor, view the topic differently. He feels no such qualms engaging in a conversation about mental illness, even when a student hasn’t explicitly brought it into the conversation.

“Having experienced it, having had profound first-person primary experience with that situation, I have always been willing kind of just to blow through that,” he says. “I graduated a very depressed person and then proceeded to spend three years very, very depressed.”

Part of McCarthy’s experience in the educational system comes from what he describes as teaching by the lash — this idea that some institutions “are very celebratory about the ways in which they are cruel and vindictive and pointless, hurtful to students.” Simply, he detests the idea that students should be challenged unreasonably under the guise that the challenges are “getting you trained for the future world,” something he says can add to a college student’s stress level.

For that, McCarthy’s advising goes beyond just picking classes and getting a student in and out of the office as fast as possible. He’s always willing to engage in a deeper conversation, and has even made it a point to go through Mental Health First Aid training.

The Mental Health First Aid course is offered both on campus and at the Bert Nash Mental Health Community Center. It aims at helping people learn how to engage in a conversation with mental illness, as well as how to listen without passing judgment, assess if a student might be at risk to commit self harm and encourage appropriate help, according to its mission statement. The training fills a need, Waisner notes, for faculty members who are “sick and tired of watching their students struggle and not knowing how to help.”

Several advisors have already gone through this training. According to Abby Coffin, director of the Undergraduate Advising Center, 25 of the 27 people in her office had already gone through it before May, while the other two had signed up for a future session.

Still, the training isn’t mandated to this point, and it doesn’t appear it will be in the near future. Part of the problem is that there isn’t a single centralized power directing the collective group of advisors. “We technically all don’t have one boss,” McCarthy says.

Without a mandate, the responsibility to help students struggling with mental illness falls on the faculty, advisors, professors and those who interact with students. And while the early numbers for the Mental Health First Aid Training have been promising, both Waisner and Taglia said they’d like to see it become mandated.

As for future initiatives, there are other things in the works at KU. Among the newer steps being taken is the creation of a Peer Mental Health Educator group, which is currently being developed by CAPS. Vargas says the group will start in the fall and feature “10 diverse students” working 10 hours a week and “providing outreach presentations, peer support and active listening at several locations around campus,” among other things.

For the present, though, the same problems remain. There’s still the idea of how people think about mental illness and the challenge of simply getting to a point where more work is being done on the preventive side than in the after stages. And there’s still the idea of mental illness as a whole and the responses many students experience when they try to engage their friends in conversation about it.

“There’s a separate part of the community that I feel people shove the mentally ill in,” Taglia says. “They think of them as a whole separate part of society.”

She continues on before pausing a moment to gather her thoughts.

“The systems that are in place right now,” she says, “aren’t working.”

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5.08.2017

Caleb Dickey, a Security Forces Member stationed in Topeka, was shot with a taser gun last June in the security forces training room at Forbes Field. This is what it feels like.

For a brief moment, I consider the possibility that TSgt. Holloman is a mind reader.

Even though my exterior shows no fear, my mind is racing. I question if I’m really going to go through with this. So I’m surprised when Holloman, who is standing just a couple feet behind me, with a taser gun pointed directly at my back, asks me for reassurance.

“Are you sure you really want to go through with this?” Holloman asked.

The question shifts me back into focus. I know there is no backing out now. Not when I watched four of my buddies go through the same experience just the day before. Not when I may have to shoot one myself someday. I need to know what it feels like, so I shake my head yes.

After all, I had just spent about 30 minutes doing my stretches. My friends had advised me to do this. Nobody could describe the initial feeling, however.

Even though I sat in this very classroom and watched all four of them go though it, I couldn’t fathom what that initial shock was going to be like. Each of them was tasered once and had different reactions. Nearly every single one of them had shouted out profanity as they went to the ground. Not me though.

Still, it happened so quickly.

“Taser, taser, taser,” Holloman said.

Immediately after I hear “taser” for the third time, my body locks up. I suddenly can’t find my breath. For five seconds, my entire body is immobile. Or at least they told me it was five seconds; I swear it felt like 50.

SSgt. Thomas and SSgt. Romstedt bring me down to a blue mat, and I can’t hold back any longer. I let out a huge exhale just before the fifth second. I can breathe again, though my body burns in pain as if I just completed a 12-hour workout.

It wasn’t long afterward I began to gain movement. The classroom full of students watched me the entire time as I started to come back to normal. They are left with a visual image, while I have a more permanent reminder. Two scars remain engraved on my body from where the taser gun split in that short amount of time. I have a scar on my left shoulder, the other is just above my right butt cheek.

Several months have passed since I was shot with a taser, and I haven’t had to use mine at my job. But if that day ever does come, at least I will have a vivid idea of what happens when I fire that weapon off.

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5.05.2017

By Rebekah Swank

It’s nearly finals week, and by this point in the semester you have a pretty good read on your professors and their personalities. There are good ones, bad ones, and ones that make you want to walk blindly onto Jayhawk Boulevard with the hope of getting hit by a bus. Here they all are as the 2017 Met Gala attendees. Because fashion.

Lily Collins wearing Giambattista Valli

Lily is the professor you admire because she really has her shit together. She has six degrees, is head of the department and gets your assignment graded within a day of you turning it in. She’s a hard ass, but you respect her for it.

Lily Aldridge in Ralph Lauren Collection Custom

Lily Aldridge, on the other hand, is the young, hip, fun professor you want to be. She completed her Ph.D. dissertation in Marrakech, and she doesn’t let you forget it. She wears stilettos or boots everywhere she goes, and you hope to one day run into her at a bar.

Kendall and Kim are like those TAs you love to hate. They are rude, not helpful and after you ask them a question, you suspect that they are talking about how stupid they think you are. When they are subbing the professor and realize no one has completed the assigned readings, they promise not to tattle on the class, but then they tell the professor and get the entire class a pop quiz.

Rihanna wearing Comme des Garçons

Rihanna is the professor we all want to have. She doesn’t take attendance, curves every test, cancels class on a semi-regular basis and doesn’t require students to take a final. She curses, and she admits when she is hungover. She is beauty and grace. She is a queen.

Joe Jonas wearing Elizabeth Kennedy

Joe is that cute professor you have a crush on. You try to pull a Lindsay Lohan in Mean Girls and dumb yourself down so you have an excuse to talk to him, but he sees right through you.

Jaden Smith wearing Louis Vuitton

Jaden Smith is that kooky professor who terrifies you. In the middle of his lecture, he says things that are weird, off-putting, gross or a combination of the three. He’s a creepy dude who wonders why he even holds office hours because no one ever comes.

Zoë Kravitz wearing Oscar de la Renta

Ah, Zoë. She is the older professor you could talk to for hours. She seems to have all the knowledge and wisdom in the world, and you can’t hear enough of it. If you have to talk to her after class, you end up staying for 30 minutes longer than you had planned because you two get swept up in conversation.